When I became Director of the DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information in 1997, we had a grand vision for a new era of global discovery. The way we provided access to scientific and technical information could be revolutionized. The internet showed promise, unbelievable promise. How exciting it was to become OSTI’s leader at that point in time.

Although the development of the Department of Energy’s web-searchable databases greatly enabled our scientific community to access R&D collections, the search technology was inefficient. How could we make the information more easily accessible to the public? Somehow we had to wrap our arms around and embrace new technologies. We had the talent, we had the motivation, and we definitely had the energy. We knew there was a better way to improve the Government’s service to its people.

Ten years ago this month Science.gov was launched! The cross-agency portal was created to break down the stovepipes of science information, knowing that it is difficult to know which federal agency holds what information. Thanks to longtime relationships between the agency senior information managers of CENDI as well as a partnership with USA.gov, and with the efforts of many, many supporters, a unique and grassroots project was undertaken and still provides an important service today. A special thanks to our Science.gov Alliance co-chairs during these years: Eleanor Frierson, NAL/USDA (retired); Tom Lahr, NBII/USGS (retired); Cindy Etkin, GPO; Tina Gheen, LOC; Annie Simpson, USGS.

OSTI joined DataCite to facilitate finding, accessing, citation of, and reusing publicly available scientific research datasets produced by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) – funded researchers. Through the OSTI Data ID Service, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to research datasets, then registered with DataCite. When registered, these datasets are announced with other forms of STI made available by OSTI as part of its mission to advance science.

Major operations for the Manhattan Engineer District (Manhattan Project) took place in remote site locations in the states of Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington, with additional research being conducted in university laboratories at Chicago and Berkeley.

At the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Enrico Fermi's experiments at the CP-1 pile took place to determine the exact amount of neutron reduction needed for a safe and controlled sustained nuclear reaction. A second pile (CP-2), with external cooling, was built at Argonne in order to move the continuing experiments away from populated areas.

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